3 Top Tips: Responsive Web Design

Fully responsive web design is no longer a luxury for your website. Google announced recently that it will punish websites that are not fully responsive. Not only this, but mobile commerce continues to increase. 2015 may be the year that mobile commerce as a whole overtakes other forms of digital commerce. This has already been the case for many years for many younger demographics.

You must make the switch into fully responsive web design today in order to build a lasting brand online. Here are three top tips that will help you make the transition or improve your scalability and marketability if you have already implemented it to some degree.

Natural Asset Scalability

The only responsive website design themes or templates that you should seriously consider using will include natural asset scalability. An asset is anything that a customer views as a separate piece of information on the screen. Pictures, text, buttons - all of these are separate assets, and all of these assets have the ability to scale naturally with the size of the screen that the customer uses.

Each asset with additional features on mouse holdover should retain those features regardless of size. For instance, navigation bar items with drop down menus must retain their menus regardless of the size of the screen. However, your web designer must make the menu fonts scale at the same rate as the original navigation bar asset to keep the website cohesive.

Sophisticated CSS designers may allow your assets to reorganize themselves if the screen gets so small that text cannot be seen. In some cases, assets that are less important may drop off the screen entirely if the user decides to reduce the display past a certain percentage.

Vertically Elongated Menus

For the most part, horizontal scrolling is panned in the world of responsive web design. People simply prefer vertical scrolling, and this includes menu scrolling.

If your laptop website has any menus that elongate along a horizontal path, they must repurpose themselves as a vertical menu. Many smart phones and tablets do not even allow for vertical scrolling past a certain point, meaning that your website may completely lose a menu item in a worst case scenario. Because the last item is most menus and along navigation bars is usually the conversion action or the sale button, you might imagine how this might negatively affect your business.

Hidden Toggle Menus

Between the choices of hidden toggle menus and on-screen toggle menus, hidden toggle menus seem to have won out. Hidden toggle menus became a trend in the iOS circles, especially those that used native Cocoa libraries for some incredible animations. The idea spread as more web designers found uses for the hidden toggle, and it has become such a normal part of the mainstream web design circuit that it is now the preferred type of menu animation.

There is one weakness to the hidden toggle menu: It relies heavily on Javascript. This may affect your decisions in the short-term, but over the long-term, Javascript will become a more integrated part of mobile design. If you are looking to create a site that will stand, then do not move away from the hidden toggle menu just because the majority of your users have mobile devices that are not yet ready for Javascript. Your web designer can create a fork that directs your customers to a Javascript free mirror if the device does not support the technology.

Please feel free to contact us when you need an online partner focused on time and cost efficiency. Our proprietary development process is based in agile scrum, a process that minimizes all time spent in bulky applications while maximizing value for your web design money.